About three years ago when we were thinking about our long term product roadmap, we recognized that we were using a growing number of open source components, they worked really well and our customers really liked what they enabled (KnockoutJS – subsequently replaced by AngularJS – being the most visible example). We therefore started to recruit people into the team from the Open Source world with the intent of increasing our use of Open Source innovation and processes. We’ve been incredibly fortunate in the people we have been able to attract; the influence of them on our product has been enormous. Jonathan Channon (@jchannon) joined us about 2 years ago; he’s a contributor to the NancyFX project and was key to our decision to make NancyFx a core component of our next generation product. NancyFx gives us blazing performance, a really clean architecture, in-house expertise and complete control of the source stack for our solution. The value of this decision has been demonstrated numerous times as the next generation of our product has gone through design and then field beta programs; Nancy has performed really well and in-house expertise into its working has been invaluable.

During the latter part of 2015, we were back on the old topic of roadmap planning, architecture and the requirement to build the scalable, fast and robust platforms required by our customers as they transition through into self-service video conferencing and unified communications. These systems are starting to get big and are going to get bigger. Like, seriously, big. The prospect of a common .Net runtime that ran on Linux and Windows and provided the level of robustness we love on Windows made a transition to CoreCLR extremely attractive.

Some time ago, Andreas (@TheCodeJunkie) posted a blog about funding to enable Nancy development. Jonathan circulated the blog and that got us thinking; the principal blocker for us getting to CoreCLR was NancyFx support. We could wait for it to happen or we could help make it happen and have more control on the outcome. Being moderately control-freak by nature, we decided to take the ‘help make it happen’ path. Working with tretton37 and Andreas would enable us to get NancyFx onto CoreCLR and we could give something back to the NancyFx team and the wider community.

We are really pleased with how the project is going; our testing on CoreCLR is showing the level of robustness on Linux we need. This is a critical investment for us and a major enabler for us moving forward. We’ll be posting more updates as things progress.

Check out the blog post from Jonathan discussing his thoughts and a blog post from tretton37 about our relationship.